Do High Thirst Distress Scores in Heart Failure and Patients with Fluid Restrictions Correlate to a Weight Gain Over a Four Week Period? A Single Cohort Study

Heart Failure (HF), a debilitating disease, affects 5.7 million people in the United States and there are an additional 600,000 cases each year (Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 2016). Evidence based practice suggests that keeping these patients on a strict fluid restriction can help lessen the symptoms associated with Heart Failure (Albert, 2012). Along with having a fluid restriction often comes an increase in the thirst reported by the patients. In the literature reviewed, there has been very little research on whether a thirst scale has been made or used for patients in heart failure. Research proves that the Thirst Distress Scale (TDS), by Welch, accurately measures thirst distress in hemodialysis patients, who like heart failure patients, are also on fluid restrictions (Welch, 2002). The purpose of this study is to utilize the TDS as a clinical measure in the treatment of Heart Failure patients. By tracking patients scores on the TDS and measuring their body weight in kilograms over a four-week period, the researchers will attempt to determine if there is a correlation between elevated thirst distress scores and weight gain in heart failure patients. This research, in conjunction with the use of the TDS scale, would assist patients and medical staff in identifying, treating and managing thirst distress in heart failure patients

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead